Ferocious Love
by rhyme time
Summary: Booth is feeling possessive of his wife.


Author's Note: I'm reading through an anthology of Pablo Neruda's poetry, and I've been inspired. Booth is feeling possessive of his wife. How perfect was that wedding?

_Because the earth shook—it did— , that awful night;_

_then dawn filled all the goblets with its wine;_

_the heavenly sun declared itself;_

_while inside, a ferocious love wound around_

_and around me—till it pierced me with its thorns, its sword,_

_slashing a seared road through my heart._

_from One Hundred Love Sonnets, III, Pablo Neruda_

Ever since the wedding, he's had the uncontrollable urge to claim and reclaim her. He feels cocky and possessive, and he just wants to be beside her and inside her for as long as the days and nights allow. But it is never enough. He is preoccupied and distracted and fulfilled and consumed by thoughts of her.

After a long day at work and after dinner and after Christine is asleep for the night, he hurries her into their bedroom where they fall carelessly onto the bed and he brands her with kisses that pass through skin to muscle and bone and bruising hands and a forceful rhythm that could hurt but doesn't.

He says things like, "I love fucking my wife," and she smiles her dreamy smile because there is a sense of belonging that wasn't there before their silver rings moved over each other's skin.

At a crime scene, he introduces her as his wife because that's what she is, and she gives him a sidelong glance that indicates both her amusement and annoyance. He realizes his mistake and clumsily corrects wife to partner, but in his mind, he says over and over again, _'But you are my wife. Mine.'_

He has had other lovers and she has had other lovers, but he has never been someone's husband and she has never been someone's wife. It is what they have given each other that doesn't belong to anyone else, and he feels greedy about this thing that is only theirs.

At the diner, she reaches for the salt and sunlight hits her ring and he knows now that everyone will know she belongs to someone, and he looks at his ring and sends a prayer heavenward that he finally belongs to someone, too.

In the breakroom at the FBI, he is refilling his coffee cup when another agent asks him the simple question, "How's life, Booth?"

Booth turns to his colleague and says, "My wife and daughter are great."

He loves saying it and he loves feeling it and he never imagined that he could ever feel the kind unending, inexplicable joy he feels about saying something that men have been saying for millennia. He revels in it; he doesn't take one second of it for granted.

So when it happens, when they are in the interrogation room interviewing a suspect as they've done a thousand times before and he is pacing around the room and Brennan gets a little bit condescending and the suspect reaches across the table, hands cuffed, and punches her in the face, all Booth can think is that this man has hit his wife.

It isn't his friend or his partner or the mother of his child.

Someone has hurt his wife.

Blood is pouring out of her nose and she is stunned and she searches for his gaze because it is times like this that man's propensity to do harm overwhelms her and because he has always been the person to help her understand these moments.

His peripheral vision narrows until all he sees is the man in front of him, and then he is over the table and the man's nose is breaking under a fist that has taken everything he's ever felt for her and distilled it into a rage that he can't stop.

His anger is out ahead of him, something he feels and sees but can't catch up to, and so he just watches it go on and on. She is pleading with him and the man is choking on his own blood and there are other agents but none of it can stop his freight train rage that is only growing in momentum.

They call for backup and they plead with him to think about his career and to think about her, and they say, "Dr. Brennan is all right, Booth," but he isn't thinking about Dr. Brennan. He is thinking about his wife who wrote him a note when she was sure she would die and that she kept for seven years, his wife who just this morning kneeled in front of him and eased her mouth around him, his wife who can be playful and affected and tender in ways that no one else knows about.

But he knows because she is his.

Hands pull at him, arms across his body, but it is her shaky voice that pierces the shell of his anger, "Booth, please stop. I'm okay. I'm okay."

It ends as quickly as it began. He is standing over the man, chest heaving, and he looks down to find her bloody hand over his heart.

"It's all right," she assures, but he looks at her, and she is afraid because she has never, in all their years together, seen him quite like this.

And beneath them, shuddering and bloody and begging, is the consequence of the terrible intensity of his love for her, and he isn't sorry. Not even a little bit.

He is sent home on suspension, and he wants to take her to the hospital, but she assures him that she will make an appointment tomorrow to tend to her broken nose.

They get home and she takes his hand and leads him to the kitchen, and she puts the bag of frozen corn on his fist because she always takes care of him first.

They have been together for years, and it always amazes him how much he loves her. He thinks he's reached maximum capacity, but then she'll do something or say something and his ability to love her expands. It scares him to think that this feeling of being awed by her and the terrible ache of loving her so desperately will never end.

He hears her call Angela and tell her what has happened. She asks her friend to pick up Christine and keep her for the night.

She hangs up the phone and leans over as if the weight of the day is bearing down on her, and it is, and he can't help but go to her and put his arms around her. His chest molds to her back and their hands gather in a knot just under her breasts.

"I'm not sorry," he whispers against her neck. "You're my wife. He hurt you."

She exhales, "I'm not asking you to be sorry, but there will be consequences."

"I know," he says, his lips skimming that same spot on her neck.

Sitting in silence, they share a bottle of wine, and he flexes his fist. He feels nothing like his father because he is nothing like his father, but she is the chink in his armor, and he feels unrecognizable in the wake of doing irrevocable harm to another person.

He isn't sorry for a second.

After her shower, when all her make up is removed, he can see the full extent of her injuries. Her lip is split, her nose is swollen, and under both eyes are half-rings of purple.

He bites down hard to swallow the anger that has nowhere to go, and she comes over to him and takes his hand.

Without words, she unknots his tie and slides it around his neck, unbuttons his shirt and slides it off his broad shoulders. She unbuckles his belt and unbuttons his dress slacks, pushing them over his hips until they pool at his feet.

She is wearing a long t-shirt that barely covers her ass, and although it is new, it feels like it has been washed a hundred times. He loves the feel of it and he loves the shape of her.

The tightness in his chest lessens when she leans forward and places a kiss on his sternum. She leads him to bed and they lie facing one another. Eventually, she turns over and faces away from him. The t-shirt rides up, and he places a hand on her bare hip.

He kisses her neck, her shoulder. He draws her closer to him.

She brings his battered hand to her lips and closes it, making a loose fist. He feels her breath ghost over his fingers followed by the soft pressure of her lips.

"I love you," she says against his hand, and he inhales deeply because she loves all of him even the parts of him that have created an uncertain future for them.

Eventually, she turns in his arms, and it hurts him to look at her battered face. The bruising is sharper, the swelling more severe.

He brings a hand to her cheek and traces her jawline with the tip of his finger. He closes his eyes and waits for morning.

_End_


End file.
